To Chancellor Reyes:
We write to denounce the university’s actions of May 7 and 8, affirm our commitment to freedom of expression and the right to non-violent protest, and demand that the administration drop all legal charges and university sanctions related to the arrests in October and May and remove these charges and sanctions from the records of students, faculty, and staff.
As artists, we recognize the power of creative disruption to the status quo. We train our students to think creatively about the problems we see in our lives and society and encourage them to practice art that challenges people to observe, think, and act in new ways.
Art and artists have also played core roles in important social movements, both in the United States and abroad; art is often charged with no less than the power to change the world. The students engaging in protest over recent weeks were using teach-ins, artmaking, and music, among other creative modalities, to object to the violence and suffering inflicted on the people of Gaza and UMass Amherst’s ongoing involvement with weapons manufacturers and military-industrial interests. These are precisely what we want our students to do—use the power of expression and creativity, rather than violence and terror, to advocate for a more just world.
Above all, UMass should be a place where students, faculty, and staff feel safe: safe to learn, safe to question and explore, safe to disagree with their teachers, peers, and colleagues, and safe to express themselves. A sense of safety requires deep trust in the institution and an understanding that no harm will come from dissenting or oppositional views. By calling in militarized police to disband a non-violent protest by force—resulting in widely documented police brutality, the arrests of over 130 students, faculty, and community members, and the inhumane treatment of those detained for over 12 hours—the administration fundamentally broke that trust. It turned a campus that should feel like home into a treacherous and unstable place.
These actions have demonstrated a pivotal unwillingness to engage in constructive dialogue, for which you have expressed a desire in your campus-wide communication. History has shown that inviting law enforcement onto university campuses in times of protest does nothing to heal conflict and bring people together—on the contrary, this only deepens divisions and removes us even further from the genuine discussion that leadership ostensibly seeks. Rather than making space for active conversation, the university’s actions have halted it entirely and eroded confidence in its ability to support similar exchanges in the future.
We stand in solidarity with students, staff, and our fellow faculty, and we affirm the right to free expression and dissent as foundational to a thriving and safe university community. If UMass truly wants its students to be revolutionary, it must start living up to its end of the bargain.
The Faculty of the UMass Amherst Department of Art